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The Scourge of the Digital Panopticon in Light of Scripture
It is July 16, 2025, a warm New England summer evening, but it’s New England, so not too warm—just right for an open-air concert. You and 55,000 fans pack Gillette Stadium, where winter crowds have gathered so many times to cheer Super Bowl-bound teams. But this is baseball season and the crowd assembled has a buzz in it because, like you, thousands of them are about to see one of the world’s biggest musical acts of the past 25 years perform.
Like everyone else in the crowd, you wear a glowing LED wristband that syncs to the music. There is electricity in the air, a vibe that vibrates, pulsates on your wrist, in your being, and in the atmosphere. The night and the music are everything you imagined and more. You know you are making the memory of a lifetime.
The band is doing their little break, a bit song called the Jumbotron Song in their “Music of the Spheres” set. Lead singer Chris Martin is playing a light acoustic guitar riff while cameras pan the crowd. He is so witty the way he improvises funny, rhyming lyrics about whoever ends up on the big screen.
Then it happened, and when it did you knew it was a moment that would change lives forever, and not for the better. The camera caught a couple. The man stood behind the woman, his arms around her. But when he saw himself on the Jumbotron, he ducked behind the seats to hide his face. The woman, horrified, buried her face in her hands.
Chris Martin quipped, “Either they’re having an affair or they’re just very shy.”
Immediately, Internet sleuths went to work to find out who they were, where they lived, where they worked, and whether they were indeed caught red-handed.
You already know the rest of the story! Even in that moment in that stadium, you feel the air sucked from your lungs. You can’t breathe. It’s like a panic attack.
Your name is Andrew Cabot. You are attending the concert to forget your troubles for a few hours, to get lost in the crowd and the music. But the woman caught on camera is Kristin, your estranged wife, and the man with his arms around her is her boss.
What it feels like to be canceled in today’s culture.
Cancel Culture is like that Gillette Stadium fiasco. It is immediate and complete. It is the unforgivable sin of our culture. The rush to judgment is like the stampede of a buffalo herd from a couple hundred years ago. Millions of human hooves—memes, news articles, commentary, comments—trample you until there is nothing left but the mangled remains of a broken life. You were human just moments before. It only took moments for the Internet to crowdsource every single thing about you, and then slice, dice, rip, tear, and leave you tattered and torn.
We live in what has been called a digital panopticon. We live in a sort of circular prison cell, in which the walls are glass so that we are always observable and observed.
Examples include ubiquitous CCTV cameras, social media tracking, workplace monitoring software, smart city surveillance, and digital COVID-19 contact tracing apps. Every time you hit “agree” on an app, you give away your privacy. It feels like they are listening and watching because they are. It is not paranoia if it is provable.
Cancel culture means something different in Heaven.
People have forever attempted to cancel others they feel better than. Last week, we read about the woman caught in adultery. It felt like a trap sprung on her, because how could she have been so careless and they so “lucky?” And where was the man?
She was just the bait, though. When I was a boy and I went to run a trot line with my grandfather, we first caught little perch in a pond. They were not the end game. They would be attached to the trot line. It was the big fish we were after. The big fish for the Pharisees was Jesus.
But Jesus turned the trap on them and they were caught in their own guilt.
Cancel culture is different with God. Yes, there is a price for sin and Jesus paid it with His life. But God never set out to cancel people. His purpose is to cancel sin and its consequences.
God doesn’t cancel sinners; He cancels sin.
When you were dead in your trespasses and in the uncircumcision of your sinful nature, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our trespasses, having canceled the debt ascribed to us in the decrees that stood against us. He took it away, nailing it to the cross! And having disarmed the powers and authorities, He made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.
—Colossians 2:13,14
So, this is different, isn’t it? The world wants to cancel the guilty. God wants to redeem the guilty and cancel the evil forces that are really at work against Him in this world. Who are those forces? Well…
For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this world’s darkness, and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.
—Ephesians 6:12
Jesus didn’t come to condemn sinners. He came to make for us a path of no condemnation.
Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.
—Romans 8:1
Those who cancel will be canceled.
Humans cannot handle the power to cancel well. We turn it on the weak, the exposed, the vulnerable, ideological and political adversaries, and anyone but ourselves. By so doing, we cancel ourselves.
Here are some instructions Jesus gave to His disciples and, therefore, to us:
“Do not judge, or you will be judged. For with the same judgment you pronounce, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.
Why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye but fail to notice the beam in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ while there is still a beam in your own eye? You hypocrite! First take the beam out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”
—Matthew 7:1–5
I cannot prove it statistically, but I know the heart of man well enough by now to believe that those quickest to the judgment seat have the most to hide. I doubt too many of the Internet sleuths doxxing others would themselves want their own Internet history to be known. Their own secret thoughts, passions, things they would do if they thought they could get away with it. We know intuitively how untrustworthy human nature really is. This is why we have axioms like “absolute authority corrupts absolutely.”
While we lack absolute authority, we forget our manners and feed our baser urges with the presumed anonymity of the digital world, which, of course, is anything but anonymous.
You can’t cancel what God appoints.
My wife and I often cancel plans. The time nears to do a thing we planned and our minds change. People do that. They cancel dental appointments because the toothache subsided. They cancel dinner plans because they had a fight or a better offer came along or whatever. And they cancel other people—just write them off for an offense.
Back in the early 80s, I offended a mentor and he told me, “We will never speak again as friends.”
I guess he meant it. I am 64 and he is in his 80s. So far, so good. Of course, he later canceled his own son for an even greater offense and that cancellation seems to be holding, too. This man was a preacher, but that isn’t the gospel, brother. Not at all.
How about we let the Apostle Paul ride us on into finish line on this sermon, as we have the others?
And we know that God works all things together for the good of those who love Him, who are called according to His purpose. For those God foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the firstborn among many brothers. And those He predestined, He also called; those He called, He also justified; those He justified, He also glorified.
What then shall we say in response to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare His own Son but gave Him up for us all, how will He not also, along with Him, freely give us all things? Who will bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is there to condemn us? For Christ Jesus, who died, and more than that was raised to life, is at the right hand of God—and He is interceding for us.
Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?
As it is written, “For Your sake we face death all day long;
we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.”
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor principalities, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
—Romans 8:28-39
My name is Gene. Some call me Preacher. And this is Sunday School.
